The first order of business in making something with the chip is to establish a clock signal. She sourced a crystal oscillator which runs at 1 MHz, but also wanted the option to single step through code. Her solution was to build two clock signals in one. A toggle switch allows her to choose the crystal, or a 555 timer circuit which uses a push button to fire each clock pulse.

Check out the video after the break to see some single stepping action. There’s no memory on board just yet. But the input pins have been hard-wired to voltage or ground to simulate data input. We wondered what she was up to with that HEX Out project which stiffs the logic on the data bus. Looks like it’s extremely useful in this project!

With the original NMOS version, yes (although you can still run it pretty slow; I’ve run my Rockwell at 100Hz). The 65C02 can be stopped with CLK0=HIGH at and left in that state indefinitely according to the datasheet.

Oh, reminds me of a Z80, an SRAM and a set of switches to the databus and addressbus about 30 years ago. It was hard work going from instructions to machine code to binary manually programming the SRAM.

BTW, Commodore 64 had the 6510 chip, not the 6502. Vic 20 had the 6502.

I was always a fan of the Z80 architecture over the motorola lineage from the 6800 to the 6502.

Back in the day, I cut my teeth on the 6802 – which is similar enough to the 6502 that I could not tell the difference. We didn’t have an assembler (much less a compiler). Instead, we had to hand assemble our programs and punch them in one nibble at a time. I had the entire instruction set memorized after a while.

Then the Tandy Coco II came out, and it had a 6809. What a great device that was. It even had a SEX instruction (sign extend).

Okay, so where’s yours? Why crap on what she did? My keychain has more computing power than that thing does but that’s not the point. You don’t build things like this to prove a point (usually) you do it for the hell of it. So what if it’s “simple” there’s some nice things she did here for example her “clocks”. That’s a nice way to allow for debugging while at the same time keeping things neat enough for when she wants to go full tilt. Again, maybe there’s a better or more elegant way, still not the point…

This chip was also used in the Atari computers, although for later versions of the 800XL and XE computers, Atari developed a cusomized version of the 6502 called Atari 6502c that adds a halt line. Any project that wakes up these processors look beautiful to me.